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An ancient set of Buddhist slogans offers us six powerful
techniques to transform life’s difficulties into awakening and benefit.

1.Turn all mishaps into the path.

2.Drive all blames into one.

3.Be grateful to everyone.

4.See confusion as Buddha and practice emptiness.

5.Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy and
pray for help.

6.Whatever you meet is the path.

1. Turn
All Mishaps into the Path

The first slogan, Turn all mishaps into the path, sounds at
first blush completely impossible. How would you do that? When things go
alright we are cheerful—we feel good and have positive spiritual feelings—but
as soon as bad things start happening, we get depressed, we fall apart, or, at
the very best, we hang on and cope. We certainly do not transform our mishaps
into the path. And why would we want to? We don’t want the mishaps to be there;
we want them gone as soon as possible.

We are not talking
about miracles. We are talking about training the mind.

Yet, the slogan tells
us, we can turn all of this into the path. We do that by practicing patience,
my all-time favorite spiritual quality. Patience is the capacity to welcome
difficulty when it comes, with a spirit of strength, endurance, forbearance,
and dignity rather than fear, anxiety, and avoidance. None of us likes to be
oppressed or defeated, yet if we can endure oppression and defeat with
strength, without whining, we are ennobled by it. Patience makes this possible.
In our culture, we think of patience as passive and un glamorous; other
qualities like love or compassion or insight are much more popular. But when
tough times cause our love to fray into annoyance, our compassion to be
overwhelmed by our fear, and our insight to evaporate, then patience begins to
make sense. To me it is the most substantial, most serviceable, and most
reliable of all spiritual qualities. Without it, all other qualities are shaky.

2.
Drive All Blames Into One

The second slogan on transforming difficult circumstances is
famous: Drive all blames into one. It, too, is quite counterintuitive, quite
upside down. What it is saying is: whatever happens, don’t ever blame anyone or
anything else; always blames only yourself.

This is tricky, because it is not exactly blaming us in the
ordinary sense. We know perfectly well how to blame ourselves. We’ve been doing
it all of our lives. We don’t need Buddhist slogans to tell us to do this. But
clearly this is not what is meant.

Drive all blames into
one means that you can’t blame anyone for what happens. Even if it’s actually
some- one’s fault, you really can’t blame them. Something happened, and since
it did, there is nothing else to be done but to make use of it.

3. Be
Grateful to Everyone

Be grateful to
everyone: this is very simple but very profound.

You need others every
single day, every single moment of your life. It’s thanks to others and their
presence and effort that you have the things you need to continue, and that you
have friendship and love and meaning in your life. Without others, you have
nothing.

So to practice be grateful to everyone is to train in this
profound understanding. It is to cultivate every day this sense of gratitude,
the happiest of all attitudes. Unhappiness and gratitude simply cannot exist in
the same moment. If you feel grateful, you are a happy person. If you feel
grateful for what is possible for you in this moment, no matter what your
challenges are, if you feel grateful that you are alive at all, that you can
think, that you can feel, that you can stand, sit, walk, talk—if you feel
grateful, you are happy and you maximize your chances for well-being and for
sharing happiness with others.

4. See
Confusion as Buddha and Practice Emptiness

The fourth slogan, See confusion as Buddha and practice
emptiness, requires a bit of explanation. This goes beyond our conventional or
relative understanding to a deeper sense of what we are. Though conventionally
I am me and you are you, from an absolute perspective, a God’s-eye view, if you
will, there is no self and other. There’s only being, and there’s only love,
which is being sharing itself with itself without impediment and with warmth.
It just happens to look like you and me to us, because this is how our minds
and sensory apparatus work. This love without boundary is emptiness practice.

See confusion as Buddha and practice emptiness means that we
situate ourselves differently with respect to our ordinary human confusion, our
resistance, our pain, our fear, our grief, and so on. Rather than hoping these
emotions and reactions will eventually go away and we will be free of them, we
take them to a deeper level. We look at their underlying reality.

So do attend births and deaths whenever you can and accept
these moments as gifts, as opportunities for deep spiritual practice. But even
when you aren’t participating in these peak moments, you can repeat and review
this slogan, and you can meditate on it. And when your mind is confused and
entangled, you can take a breath and try to slip below the level of your desire
and confusion. You can notice that in this very moment time is passing, things
are transforming, and this impossible fact is profound, beautiful, and joyful,
even as you continue with your misery.

5. Do
Good, Avoid Evil, Appreciate Your Lunacy, Pray for Help

First, do good. Do positive things. Say hello to people,
smile at them, tell them happy birthday, I am sorry for your loss, is there
something I can do to help? These things are normal social graces, and people
say them all the time. But to practice them intentionally is to work a bit
harder at actually meaning them. We genuinely try to be helpful and kind and
thoughtful in as many small and large ways as we can every day.

Second, avoid evil.
This means to pay close attention to our actions of body, speech, and mind,
noticing when we do, say, or think things that are harmful or unkind. Having
come this far with our mind training, we can’t help but notice our shoddy or
mean-spirited moments. And when we notice them, we feel bad. In the past we
might have said to ourselves, “I only said that because she really needs
straightening out. If she hadn’t done that to me, I wouldn’t have said that to
her. It really was her fault.” Now we see that this was a way of protecting
ourselves (after all, we have just been practicing Drive all blames into one)
and are willing to accept responsibility for what we have done. So we pay
attention to what we say, think, and do—not obsessively, not with a
perfectionist flair, but just as a matter of course and with generosity and
understanding—and finally we purify ourselves of most of our ungenerous
thoughts and words.

6.
Whatever you meet is the Path

This slogan sums up the other five: whatever happens, good
or bad, make it part of your spiritual practice.

In spiritual practice, which is our life, there are no
breaks and no mistakes. We human beings are always doing spiritual practice,
whether we know it or not. You may think that you have lost the thread of your
practice, that you were going along quite well and then life got busy and
complicated and you lost track of what you were doing. You may feel bad about
this, and that feeling feeds on itself, and it becomes harder and harder to get
back on track.

But this is just what you think; it’s not what’s going on.
Once you begin practice, you always keep going, because everything is practice,
even the days or the weeks or entire lifetimes when you forgot to meditate.
Even then you’re still practicing, because it’s impossible to be lost. You are
constantly being found, whether you know it or not. To practice this slogan is
to know that no matter what is going on—no matter how distracted you think you
are, no matter how much you feel like a terribly lazy individual who has
completely lost track of her good intentions and is now hopelessly astray—even
then you have the responsibility and the ability to take all negativity, bad
circumstance, and difficulty and turn it into the path.